Homophobia & Italian-Americans
Brandon Bisby

    “I see fags on my radar...let’s get um!” is some of the first words we hear from the short film Nunzio’s second cousin as the characters of Tony and his black lover are chased down a dark street in Chicago. After having just left Cheek (A clever play on words to perhaps insinuate to the role of sex that is voraciously common among Gay men), a group of under-aged Italian-Americans run down Tony, a police officer, and his black lover. Bats in hand, these Italian-American adolescents are quickly turned on by Tony who came armed with a handgun. Tony forces these boys to recite some phrases, such as stating how good the gays are, how they must be willing to help the gays in their pursuit of sexual pleasure, and also letting them know how the great Italian painter Michelangelo was gay. A scene like this was quite vulgar and was not only homophobic but it came off as a bit cynical that someone who had been facing discrimination and violence was here himself being incredibly threatening and practically assaulting one of the boys at his own home. Yet it is this scene from this short films which proves the point in my argument that I am trying to make, that having a homophobic attitude as an Italian-American is a hypocritical idea as many Italian-American immigrants come from descendants of those who migrated from Italy and faced discrimination in many of the same ways their gay Italian-American counterparts face. In order to argue that this idea of homophobia is hypocritical, I will be talking about what is a gay Italian-American, what discrimination have italian americans face, discrimination gay Italian-Americans face, and why Italian-Americans shouldn’t be homophobic but be pro LGBT.

    What is a gay Italian American is a difficult question to answer and is in fact almost impossible to answer. There is just no sure fire way to look at an Italian-American and know they are gay. I bring up this point because it harkens back to the age old question we have been attempting to answer in class since Day 1… what is an Italian-American? I still remember that the whiteboard had filled up with many different ideas of what we define as an Italian-American and all these ideas were quite diverse. The conclusion we came up with is that there is no right answer and what defines someone as an Italian-American differs from person to person and is ultimately left for the person to decide for themselves. So what makes someone gay? Again, this goes back to the question of what is an Italian-American and the impossibility of having a concrete definition. An example I would like to use of the broad spectrum of defining a gay Italian-American is the role of sexuality and masculinity played by John Travolta in the film Saturday Night Fever. Throughout the film, John Travolta plays a hyper-masculine character named Tony who is constantly going to the disco in order to show off his dance moves in hopes of taking home a woman, hanging out with his group of friends saying vulgarities about the women and other minorities, and lastly the way in which he walks gives off an aura of masculinity that many would not question as being gay. Of course this is true in the film as his character is heterosexual but there are a few scenes where film critics at the time of its released had questioned his sexuality in the film. Two examples that I am referring to is the fact that Ton loves to dance, which at the time was seen as a bit effeminate. The other example was the amount of detail Tony had paid to grooming himself and the amount of men he had as posters in his room, another aspect of Tony that many had perceived as very effeminate. Tony, a masculine Italian-American shows the difficulty of being able to justly label someone as straight (heterosexual) or gay and I believe is a good example of the similarities between labeling someone as a gay and labeling someone as an Italian-American.

    The second point I would like to go over is referring back to the points of discrimination Italian-American have faced throughout many of our readings in class. In the reading, Ask the Dust, we were able to read about some of the discrimination Arturo faces right here in California. On page 49, Arturo is asked if whether he is a Mexican or a Jew while checking into a hotel as the hotel states that they do not allow either to stay there. More instances throughout the book that we see is Arturo being referred to with derogatory names such as WOP, Dago, and greaser while also using these names to refer to others himself. At some point, Arturo even uses these terms to refer to himself, perhaps in an effort to embrace these names rather than see them as derogatory. Another point of discrimination we learned about was at the very beginning of this semester in regards to the lynching of Italian-Americans. We learned that many Italian-Americans in the southern part of the United States had often been forced to live and work with the African-American communities. These African-American communities were heavily discriminated against and often lived in the worst conditions when compared to their white counterparts. It is because of this associate with blacks, lack of English knowledge, and often being poor that Italian-Americans had to be categorized as not white but some “other” thing that was not white. This othering is what made it ok for WASP’s at the time to not only discriminate against the Italian-Americans, but out right mob against them and pin them to crimes they did not commit, which ultimately lead to them being lynched.
  
 Italian-Americans were not the only ones discriminated against however, as the gay community knows all too well what discrimination is. “Most gay people are told by their families and communities that they are abnormal, disgusting, worthless, sick, and sinful (LoGiudice 22),” recounts the author of Our Naked Lives as he talks about his life growing up as an Italian-American. “They yelled Gay Boys! And eww, fag, get away from me! (LoGiudice 75)” This is only but a sliver of the discrimination the author talks about in this book and yet it wasn’t always direct discrimination the gay Italian-American community was facing. “No one pays any attention to them, they have never been written about (LoGuidice 34)” and “Gay people should be tolerated only as long as they suffer their condition in silence and don’t demand civils rights or social acceptance (LoGuidice 56)” are two examples where although they are not directly discriminated against, they are marginalized indirectly and are given hardly any social benefits. I want to keep these two sections brief as I feel it’s important to talk about why I am comparing being gay and being Italian-American.

    “Italy has one of the world’s gayest cultures. Art, opera, fashion, and the long running drag show called the Catholic Church all come from there (LoGiudice 92)” and yet the gay community was described as “other” when every Italian-American has this gayness inside of them. They stem from one of the gayest cultures but to them it is not gay, only when it benefits their homophobic ideas are these seen as gay. Why I brought up the comparison of discrimination between and Italian-Americans and Gays is that I believe it is very hypocritical for Italian-Americans to be homophobic in any sense. For generations the Italian-American immigrants to the US faced lynching, categorization of othering, and verbal discrimination against them and the gay community has also faced many of the same things that these immigrants have faced yet gay Italian-Americans have been unaccepting of these gays. With a shared experience of discrimination and harassment, I would think some mutual understanding & support would have developed but more often than not, the gay Italian-American community has been ostracized by la famiglia. “Hatred toward homosexuals is learned in the Italian American community...no room for flexibility...openly discriminated against because I did not conform to their ways (LoGiudice 83-85)” is an example where an explanation as to why the Italian-American community discriminates against the gay community seems plausible. Throughout our course, we have learned the importance of religion and family often present in many Italian-American aspects of life, which are two things that the gay community go against. Gays are not able to reproduce and thus do not provide any type of family and with the church having a literal and figurative stronghold in Italy for centuries now, they have used their influence to denounce homosexuality.

    Going against tradition, against conforming, and against family values it is not difficult to see why Italian-Americans may be homophobic. They may feel it is attack on their identity of being an Italian-American. The need to label someone else as “other” for once turns the blame and shame many Italian immigrants felt at the beginning of the century onto someone else. It allows the Italian-Americans to perhaps be seen as a true “white american” while pivoting the blame onto another minority in order to benefit themselves. This is why I see this homophobia is very hypocritical as a group of immigrants is not only discriminating against their own people, but they are discriminating against a group in many ways in which they had also been discriminated against. Although the situation has been improving over the past few decades, I still believe Italian-Americans are embarrassed of homosexuality among their own community. With the ability to integrate into the United States as a functional and hard working people, I am sure that with time and learning, the Italian-Americans will accept their own gays and see them as something to be proud of rather than embarrassed as "Everything is fine...he's just gay (Fuori per sempre). "